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Review: Sun StarOffice 7
ValourX writes "Here's the Internet's first comprehensive review of Sun's new StarOffice 7 suite. With the ability to export to PDF and SWF and greatly improved conversion filters, Sun's $80 office suite is more than a match for the upcoming ultra-expensive Microsoft Office System 2003."
I wonder if the SWX format will ever really take hold. No doubt it will need something like a very good StarOffice suite to bring it into its own. (And maybe a boost from Microsoft secure documents / forced upgrade)
I have wanted to bring my company onto the free/cheap opensource software bandwagon for some time now. And I have the authority to do it. But I always have to consider the issue - can non-techsmart people handle it? Will they be able to open the documents they receive and use them.
In many ways a really good Office suite will help linux/open source just as much as the benefits of the OS itself.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
When our kids went to school september 1st, I volounteered as computer fixer. First thing I did was throw off ALL (I'll repeat : ALL) office suites of all computers. That included MS Office, Open Office and Appleworks. I replaced them with Wordpad and similar "silly" editors.
We're september 19, and NOBODY noticed. I got 1 remark from a teacher telling me that this year, the kids seemed to get along better with the computers compared to last year.
All this just to prove that 90% of current software can be reduced to the max in 90% of all machine instances.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
I have just convinced my boss to switch over StarOffice 7, and the features and support were a major factor in putting it into his comfort zone. He was quite reticent before then. I don't think Microsoft will really be hurt by it's release immeadiately, but it will help a lot of companies start to slowly adopt more alternative options.
MS might be expensive but the stuff just works.
Give me a break. I've (unfortunately) been programming in VBA for Excel for a couple of months, and it's buggy as hell. One bug that I had to work around has existed since Excel 95, and they clearly have no intention of ever fixing it. It crashes, it behaves badly, etc. Just works, my ass.
ValourX, the author of the review, also has a comprehensive comparison of word processors, and here OpenOffice doesn't fare so well. The author seems much more impressed with TextMaker for Linux.
The real question is who is even bothering upgrading from Office 2000. All of these alternative Office suites may have finally caught up in most ways but unless you are stupid a new company and don't already have licenses for 2000 I can't see why anybody would bother. And don't tell me about forced upgrade and all that. I am working on a none DRM Windows 2000 thinkpad with Office 2000. I've had it for almost 3 years and have not seen once reason to upgrade and I know my company agrees.
why does the PIM need to be part of the office suite? It doesn't make sense.. everything else is managing documents, PIMs are calendaring and email (why those to are shoehorned together is another post entirely..).
Get your pim elsewhere. There are TONS of options these days.
I post links to stuff here
I'm not knocking any of the completely OSS suites, far from it. But I think Sun is doing everybody a service by demonstrating to the PHBs that a major software player can produce credible competition for Office and sell it for peanuts. I want to see people making money out of FOSS - because that will keep it developing - and if Sun's work leads others to produce customised and extended office suites based on other OSS suites, that should get back the pace of development that has been so held back by the MS monopoly.
Also, although I'm too old to use the terminology without looking sad, the XML output format rocks. People will be able to do some really creative things with this.
Remember: once upon a time almost all tires were crossply. Then along came radial. No technology has a right to a monopoly for longer than it takes for something better to come along.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
We exported all of our sales documents (pitch sheets, memos, forms, rate cards, posters, etc.) to flash instead of PDF over the summer. The smallest we could compress a PDF of these documents was around 300kb each (from CoredDraw 9). We can export them to Flash, which gets them at perfect quality for under 80kb. That's a hell of a lot of storage savings when you put all your sales docs on a website.
Install the open source applications side-by-side with the commercial applications that you plan to replace. You can install Staroffice or OpenOffice right along with MS office, and make sure that it is as support or even more so by your IT department. That means, the users don't get "We don't know, you're on your own" answers from Tech for Staroffice, but then get a dissertation when they ask a question about MS Office.
After you have a installation that is supported ( internally ) and documented as well as ( or better ) than MS Office, ( I know, easier said than done, but do your best ), and the users have had some time to become a little familiar with Staroffice. Start promoting StarOffice as an alternative to MS Office. This could be done easier now. You can direct, for instance, people who need to create simple PDF files to StarOffice for instance. Thats something MS Office can not do without 3rd party software installed.
I think IT departments should give the user an incentive to move to cheaper, well performing software. Eg. The department could get a cut from the money saved, while IT gets a cut and the company holds the rest. This may be difficult to execute because many IT managers don't like decreasing they budget, even if doing so may, in a roundabout way, leave them more money in they pockets at the end of the day.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
I did an assingment this week for my comparative vertebrate morphology class. It was about scaling and allometry - a very interesting subject. The assignment was to take some measurements from various lagomorph (rabbits and hares) skulls and to plot them against one another to see what sorts of scaling relationships there are between characters in different ages of the same species (ontogenetic allometry) and between different related species (phylogenetic allometry).
The instructor showed us how to do the plots in Excel. I was planning to do my assignment in OpenOffice Calc, and to let the instructor know that there is a free alternative for impoverished students to use, but Calc doesn't do everything that I needed it to do. Calc will add a trendline using various types of functions, but it will not show the equation or the R squared value on the graph. After digging through OpenOffice Help I found a discussion on the OpenOffice forum about it. It's issue #4509, and it's not scheduled to be fixed in 1.1. So I grudgingly used Excel and Word to make my report, and lost a good opportunity to spread the word.
In defense of OpenOffice: I have used it for months now and I dig it. This is the first time I've had any problems with it, and this is actually a pretty minor thing. I especially like OpenOffice's style tools, which have really changed the way I author documents.
I rtfa and it was pretty light - more questions for anyone who's used Star Office in a professional environment - hows the automation (does it have anything equivelant, or, hopefully, better, than useful-but-bugriddled VBA?) How's the interoperability with MSWord documents? Can you go from Word to OOo/StarOffice and back a hundred times in a large document that 20 people have edited in 70 different ways, with embedded graphics, tables, etc. U know, does it WORK?
.1 - 1%, which is a lot if you have a half million documents) of them will).
I'm as close to an expert in MS Office as anyone (outside Woody of WOPR and the lovely lady behind slipstick), I write VBA (when I have to) and have taught classes in the thing. And I hate it. It's truely a horrible product, MS tried to do too much and failed to get the important things right (like, say, making sure that if you have 1,000 large documents on a network storage device, none of them experience format-wrenching corruption at any point over thier lifespan. With Word, anywhere from 1 - 10 (yea, that's
Have any large, document-oriented shops (like, say a law firm, or pharmeceutical company, or something) ever done a real, hard test, both on the suite and its interoperablity with MS stuff?
closed minded is as closed minded does
Yeah, OK. I just sent an email to our comptroller / CIO to see what he thinks. We've been under some pretty serious budget constraints, and MS Office is really costly. If it passes muster, that'll be a $1500 check to Sun.
I actually hope it works, because PDF and Flash export options are really killer. We've got one copy of Acrobat for the whole office, which sucks the big one. Don't get me started on how cool I think Flash would be for presentations. Our Prez is kinda fat-fingered during presentations and borks up the flow sometimes.
Yes there is a lot of software out there in VB that integrates various office features. I wrote some of it. Naturally I was resistant to the idea. What resulted was a set of interrelated "documents" with bizzare code inside them, linking them all together. It probably took me a week to do everything. In the same amount of time, I could have written a web-based database application that did the same thing, but be infintely more stable and easy to roll out to users. Use the right tool for the job. VB inside Word or Excel has serious drawbacks that make it almost always the wrong tool for a particular job.
How about Star Office for OS X? Plenty of people are buying Macs today, and why should Microsoft get revenue from that platform as well? As it stands, Sun could make money in this endeavor because how many rank-and-file OS X users are actually going to stoop to using Open Office via the X11 Window? And officially, Open Office for OS X is being delayed until 2005! Apple surely cannot assign any of their programming staff to working on the OS X port because Microsoft would then cut out all Mac development in response. So all I can see are $$$'s if Sun would be so inclined to spend a little cash on porting Star Office over to OS X...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
OpenOffice and StarOffice are fine if you want one package with everything in it. But why bother?
LyX can be used to create professional documents using standard typesetting, which prevents a whole slew of the inconsistencies generated when the user has to define the typesetting. We all know how many database, spreadsheet, and presentation-creation programs there are that you can use for GNU/Linux -- a lot. There's also tons of e-mail programs too.
The vast majority of users don't use half of the features in various Office Programs. For those that do need that kind of functionality, you can get it in StarOffice or OpenOffice, along with Evolution for e-mail. But I'll tell you, the vast majority of people who use Microsoft Outlook or Evolution use them just to check their e-mail, and not as a central planning point for their lives.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Not to mention that postgresql is not native for Windows yet (slated for next year), and requires a commercial version that costs $$ or Cygwin. The Cygwin way of doing things limits performance by a factor of 2 or 3, which is BAD!
MySQL is different, but lacks a decent frontend by default. Adabas is the same, as I see it, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. The majority of accountants out there use Spreadsheets when they should be using databases, only the smart ones know the difference. Of all of the accounting spooks at this place, only one uses Access (and he's a consultant). Even though Star ships with Adabas, it's still a rather scary and foriegn thing.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Those menu items that hide themselves. Yes I know it can be turned off. Yes I have turned it off. You asked for a bad feature, if bad featuring was an olympic sport then hidey menus would get a gold.
But, that doesn't mean that those problems don't exist, of course!
Any new (re)implementation of the OLE concept should be engineered to be robust, but that's doable. I think the basic OLE *concept* is totally valid; the fact that the Microsoft implementation is less than perfect doesn't mean that it can't be done right.
I think it *should* be done, too. I may not be a typical user, but many of the documents I have to write and/or maintain are big-ass Word documents with dozens of embedded tables and diagrams. Being able to double-click an embedded Visio chart and edit it in place beats the crap out of having to do the "copy, start Visio, paste, edit, copy, paste back" routine.
Defining the UI guidelines and the APIs is a challenge, but plug-in technologies are a lot better today than they were when Microsoft designed OLE. Just think JavaBeans, for example.
This is an important feature, and it's no rocket science to implement. I can't wait to see someone define a standard like this, and StarOffice seems like the perfect starting point. I really think this could spark a revolution in Unix desktop productivity apps.
Star Office is to be run on Mad Hatter due December. But as i posted on OS maybe in that amount of time Sun could take a look at Java for X desktop environment that put v0.1 out. A little rough but with some development and some skins like those that were made for Morpheus, this could really be something interesting to look at and watch develop. http://jdx.sourceforge.net/ Seems to me like this would be the REAL Java Desktop System
1. Try getting a picture to go where you want it at first go. 2. Try making some columns, then remove them. Then change your mind and try to get them back. Word will start making all parts of the document in columns. I've had many a document trashed because of MS-Word's abilities to handle columns in a sane way.